In the Media

Center for Student Diversity and Inclusion In the News

The Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech), one of the nation’s top-ranked research universities, has devoted many resources to supporting research by and about diverse scholars. One social issue Georgia Tech is especially committed to is the representation of female scholars and innovators in tech and other STEM disciplines. In 1995, the school created the Women, Science, and Technology (WST) minor — the first academic program in the U.S. focused specifically on understanding the interplay of “issues in the study of science and technology with those of gender, culture, and society,” according to the university’s website. Following the creation of the minor, the university established the WST Center to oversee the program and other academic endeavors focused on increasing gender equity in STEM.

National Conversation

Even after decades of affirmative action, black and Hispanic students are more underrepresented at the nation’s top colleges and universities than they were 35 years ago, according to a New York Times analysis. The share of black freshmen at elite schools is virtually unchanged since 1980. Black students are just 6 percent of freshmen but 15 percent of college-age Americans. More Hispanics are attending elite schools, but the increase has not kept up with the huge growth of young Hispanics in the United States, so the gap between students and the college-age population has widened.

Students aren’t always comfortable talking about race, especially at the beginning of the semester in a classroom led by a professor they don’t know yet. But this semester, Wendy Christensen, an associate professor of sociology at William Paterson University, in New Jersey, is starting off her course by tackling racism head-on. "Social Stratifications," will begin on September 6 with a discussion about the violent weekend in Charlottesville, Va., she said.

A pair of researchers with the University of Massachusetts has found evidence that suggests women are more likely to continue to pursue a degree in engineering if they have a female mentor. Nilanjana Dasgupta, an instructor, and her Ph.D. student Tara Dennehy paired first-year female engineering majors with older mentors for a year and then looked at the impact mentoring had the decision to continue pursuing their degree as they moved into their second year. They have published their findings in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

College completion rates vary widely along racial and ethnic lines, with black and Hispanic students earning credentials at a much lower rate than white and Asian students do, according to a report released by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. These numbers likely won’t surprise most people who track higher education closely, as they fall in line with what other studies have found over the years, but “it will certainly reinforce the point that there’s more work to be done,” said Doug Shapiro, one of the lead authors of the report.

By the age of six, young girls are less likely than boys to view their own gender as brilliant. In later life, these differences in children’s perceptions are likely to be consequential. In fact, in a paper published in the journal Science in 2015, women are underrepresented in fields thought to require brilliance – fields that include some of the most prestigious careers in society, such as those in science and engineering. It may be that the roots of this underrepresentation stretch all the way back to childhood.

Despite African-Americans being 13.3 percent of the U.S. population, there's a disproportionately low number of black students graduating with technical degrees. In 2010, only 1 percent of black American college freshmen were in engineering programs, according to NSBE cited by The Atlantic. Some schools and nonprofits have noticed the gap and are taking calculated initiatives to change the current trends. In particular, the NSBE set what Nelson called a "big, hairy, audacious" societal goal of getting 10,000 black engineering graduates annually by 2025. But it's going to take focus and commitment.

As has been the trend in recent years, Georgia Tech's credentials set new highs for an incoming class. The students represent 69 countries, 43 states, 89 Georgia counties, and 1,429 high schools (307 in Georgia). The class is 42 percent female — an Institute record for the second year — and 58 percent male.

According to the U.S. government's Student and Exchange Visitor Program, the total number of active female international students studying STEM in the U.S. increased more than 68 percent from 76,638 students in 2010 to 128,807 in 2015, with the largest increase at the master's degree level. The majority of those students were from India and China.

This past year, in high-profile confrontations across the country, student activists have been making demands about campus climate and diversity. But mobilized students share at least one demand: supporting demographic diversity on campus.

Now that the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled to uphold the use of race in college admissions, colleges and universities should assess their policies in a way that takes a more nuanced look at diversity, a higher education scholar said.

But critics of Connecticut’s housing project and similar efforts say such diversity "silos" can be limiting, leading students who identify with particular groups to confine much of their intellectual and social life to narrow factions. One recent study suggests that membership in ethnically segregated organizations can actually increase tensions among students of different races. And some critics go further, saying these silos are nothing more than segregation in disguise.

The persistence, pervasiveness, and plain messiness that constitute race relations in America have rendered traditional models of social change ineffective in higher education. The current racial justice movement on college campuses nationwide provides us with a needed sense of urgency and clear insight into how the racial contours of a university can change.

College officials have spent decades rolling out one initiative after the next, from scholarships to summer bridge programs to race-conscious admissions, to attract students from underrepresented populations. Since 1980, the percentage of blacks and Hispanics among those attending higher education institutions has more than doubled, from 13 percent to 28 percent in 2014, while the white population has dipped to about 52 percent from 84. Yet administrators might have been missing a trickier truth: Diversity is one thing, inclusion is another.

Dozens — perhaps hundreds — of institutions already require their students to take at least one course that explores diversity in some manner. Many colleges have students select from a broad menu of classes that cover issues related to race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, or religion; a smaller group of institutions have focused the requirement more narrowly on racial and ethnic studies.

What started as an employee recruitment campaign has become a social media movement for women aiming to break stereotypes in the tech industry. Using the hashtag #ILookLikeAnEngineer, thousands of women have tweeted photos of themselves with explanations of the work they do as engineers.